“If only American politics weren’t so partisan, I might be able to make sense of it all, but I can’t,” McSweeney’s Devorah Blachor wrote Wednesday afternoon.

The Donald Trump impeachment inquiry’s opening public hearing featured William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Testimony by two obviously competent, obviously committed foreign service officers dedicated to lives of service left Blachor perplexed:

At the hearing, I saw two serious, professional men who both served under Republican and Democrat administrations. Yet just last week, President Trump was ordered to pay two million dollars for using charity funds to pay off his business debts and promote himself. How can a voter like me be expected to know who is more credible?

[…]

What sounds more believable? That career diplomats with everything to lose would make up a story implicating the most powerful man in America? Or that the president’s butt-dialling, criminal-loving lawyer was involved in something nefarious? I wish this would be easier!

The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri found the five-hour hearing similarly satire-worthy:

REPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: And don’t you, of course, the Fusion GPS, when we know Alexandra Chalupa has not been called, of course?

TAYLOR: I’m trying, I’m really trying, to find the question in that.

Petri refers to veteran Republican staff attorney Steve Castor’s questioning of the two diplomats. Here is a sample:

Castor spent an extraordinary amount of time asking witnesses to acknowledge they know nothing about things and people they know nothing about. Those include Russian-inspired conspiracy theories about Black Ledgers and missing computer servers promoted by Trump’s defenders. Where once Republicans spoke in dog whistles, they now speak in cult whistles only Fox News viewers and fans of “QAnon” can hear. The day did not go well for Trump or the GOP.

Democrats hired Daniel Goldman earlier this year to lead their questioning. Goldman served as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York for ten years. He prosecuted mobsters on racketing and murder charges, including “a Genovese Family Boss and two hitmen on a case involving RICO, two murders, one attempted murder, and two murder conspiracies.”

For a month, the two attorneys led their party’s questioning of witnesses behind closed doors. Their first public appearance proved Castor was no match for his counterpart Goldman.

The most important news from yesterday’s hearing came at the end of Taylor’s opening statement. The event occurred the day after the July 25 call between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked for “a favor”:

Last Friday, a member of my staff told me of events that occurred on July 26. While Ambassador Volker and I visited the front, this member of my staff accompanied Ambassador Sondland. Ambassador Sondland met with Mr. Yermak.

Following that meeting, in the presence of my staff at a restaurant, Ambassador Sondland called President Trump and told him of his meetings in Kyiv. The member of my staff could hear President Trump on the phone, asking Ambassador Sondland about “the investigations.” Ambassador Sondland told President Trump that the Ukrainians were ready to move forward.

Following the call with President Trump, the member of my staff asked Ambassador Sondland what President Trump thought about Ukraine. Ambassador Sondland responded that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden, which Giuliani was pressing for. At the time I gave my deposition on October 22, I was not aware of this information. I am including it here for completeness. As the Committee knows, I reported this information through counsel to the State Department’s Legal Adviser, as well as to counsel for both the Majority and the Minority on the Committee. It is my understanding that the Committee is following up on this matter.

In his October testimony, Sondland denied Trump presented Zelensky with any “arms for political dirt” deal, as former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner framed it last night. Sondland revised his testimony on Nov. 5 to say he remembered discussing the linkage with Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to Zelensky, during a meeting in Warsaw on Sept. 1.

Sondland is scheduled to testify publicly on Nov. 20. Democrats will ask why he omitted from his testimony a call to reassure the president investigations were coming. (Stock up on popcorn.) If Sondland hoped to avoid a perjury indictment in “coming clean,” Slate’s Fred Kaplan writes, Taylor’s testimony and the forthcoming testimony of his staffer indicate “Sondland didn’t come clean enough.” David Holmes, Taylor’s staffer, is scheduled to appear before a closed-door hearing on Friday.

Republicans on the committee complained repeatedly that Taylor and Kent had no contact with Trump nor any firsthand knowledge of his directives. This is, as they know, only because the Trump administration has refused to allow those with direct knowledge to testify, in addition to stonewalling House requests for critical documents. In a tossed-off comment last night, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called Trump’s “an administration taking the 5th.”

by Tom Sullivan

Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows still wants to be Donald Trump’s next chief of staff, the Washington Examiner reported on Friday. Meadows did not make the cut last December when he was in the running. Mick Mulvaney holds the job in an “acting” capacity for now, and Mulvaney is under a cloud.

It might be an opportune for Meadows to leave his R+14 sinecure in North Carolina’s far west before it leaves him. A state court has ordered congressional districts redrawn for the 2020 cycle. Before the 2011 “surgical” gerrymandering that split Asheville between NC-10 and NC-11, Blue Dog Heath Shuler held the R+6 seat. Any map acceptable to the court today could make Meadows’ reelection far more challenging. Good time for him to consider a job change.

Republicans in Raleigh are working on the new map this week in a process rumored to be public. As I noted Thursday, Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections expressed doubts:

This is the congressional map that North Carolina Republicans just saved ahead of wrapping up for the day. I can tell just from looking at it that the Sandhills gets completely cracked & it will likely mean an 8-5 GOP majority delegation instead of 7-6 R or 7-6 D #NCGA #NCpol pic.twitter.com/Hx2clWne2y

— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) November 6, 2019

Like many swing and red states, much of North Carolina is rural. “West of the Balsams” (as Shuler referred to a ridge 40 minutes west of Asheville), NC-11 is densely forested and sparsely populated. That doesn’t mean there are no Democratic voters out there. NC-11 went narrowly for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary.

This week, New York magazine examined how Democrats can take back rural places like that.

Stephen Smith helped organize West Virginia’s Working Families Party affiliate. He is running in 2020 as a Democrat to challenge incumbent Republican Jim Justice for governor. He tells Sarah Jones, “In West Virginia and in most rural places in America, the fight is not left versus right at all. It’s the good old boys versus everyone else.” That rings true here as well.

Jones writes:

The Can’t Wait campaign isn’t necessarily about electing Democrats, but about fundamentally changing the makeup of the state’s political class … But Can’t Wait has ambitions bigger than the governor’s mansion: It wants to build a movement. The group now has a presence in each of the state’s 55 counties, where county captains direct organizing at the local level. It also runs 39 teams committed to organizing specific demographics and communities, a tactic that builds on recent populist momentum in the state.

West Virginia’s teachers sparked national protests in 2018 after they staged a walkout. When Republican legislators tried to introduce charter schools to the state in 2019, teachers walked out again.

Jane Fleming Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, has criticized party leaders for what she characterizes as their neglect of rural constituencies. “I think one of the biggest problems that we are facing, and this may sound so simple to say, is that none of our national party leaders live in a rural community,” she said. “When you’re looking at a candidate in a rural community and you’re not from a rural community, you don’t see the path to victory.”

People who actually live in those communities, she added, “know what is possible and how to win.”

But they could use some support. Nebraska once received $25,000 per month from the national party. A Sanders supporter in 2016, Kleeb says things have gotten somewhat better after getting much worse:

“I tell Chair Perez this, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was just in Nebraska two days ago and I said this to her as well, we cannot continue to starve state parties and think that somehow we are magically going to come up with some unicorn of a candidate that is going to turn things around,” said Kleeb. She adds that things have improved recently: Her state party is now getting $10,000 a month from the Democratic National Committee, as opposed to $2,500 a month while President Obama was in office.

Former senators Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana believe Democratic policies are out of step with rural America. They’ve formed their own One Country Project aligned with Partnership for America’s Health Care Future which, the Intercept reports, opposes Medicare for All.

Jones continues:

The three former senators share a familiar logic. They conflate rural with a preference for centrist or even conservative policies and rhetoric. In this vision, rural America is still Trump country. Its residents will budge so far and no further, so the naïveté of the left threatens the party’s survival.

Yet, hospitals are closing by the dozens in rural America, especially in states that rejected Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Farm country communities are becoming food deserts, the New York Times reported this week:

The loss of grocery stores can feel like a cruel joke when you live surrounded by farmland. About 5 million people in rural areas have to travel 10 miles or more to buy groceries, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Dollar-store chains selling cheap food are entering hundreds of small towns, but their shelves are mostly stocked with frozen, refrigerated and packaged foods. Local health officials worry that the flight of fresh foods will only add to rural America’s health problems by exacerbating higher rates of heart disease and obesity.

Many of the places losing their grocery stores are conservative towns that value industrial agriculture and low taxes. About 75 percent of the people in the county containing Winchester [Illinois] voted for President Trump. But people in these communities have also approved public money to kick-start local markets, and they are supporting co-ops whose cloth-bag values and hand-stuffed packs of arugula can feel more Berkeley than Mayberry.

“Communities tell me: We don’t want to use the term co-op,” said Sean Park, a program manager for the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs. He has helped guide rural towns through setting up their own markets. “It’s ironic because it was farmers who pioneered co-ops. They’re O.K. with ‘community store.’ They’re the same thing, but you’ve got to speak the language.”

Smaller municipalities (map at top) and rural places want and need attention. They need local hospitals to remain open more than they need them to remain for-profit. They need broadband service being stymied by corporate lobbyists angling in state capitals for subsidies and a piece of the action, and by Republicans unwilling to support it at the federal level.

Howard Dean once countered (as Kleeb does now): “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win.”

Democrats who promote every damned presidential election as the most important election of our lifetimes never find time or dollars for building presence and influence in places that determine the composition of state legislatures which 1) influence the composition of the U.S. House through redistricting, as well as 2) the partisan balance in the U.S. Senate, and ultimately 3) the composition and tenor of the U.S. Supreme Court. The suburbs this week may have handed Kentucky’s governorship to Democrats, but very narrowly. Republicans won the rest of the statewide races.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

Surrounding the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald J. Trump, what Americans and the world are witnessing is a Stanford Prison Experiment with a touch of Stanley Milgram. Or maybe Jesus. (I’ll explain in a minute.)

In Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 social experiment, he had a group student volunteer males “arrested” (there was a squad car), booked, and placed in a mock prison in the basement of one of the university’s buildings for an experiment in the psychological effects of prison life. Another group of average, “healthy, intelligent, middle-class males” would serve as prison guards. All would receive $15/day for participating in the videotaped experiment.

Things went downhill within 36 hours. The guards became abusive. The prisoners rebelled:

Every aspect of the prisoners’ behavior fell under the total and arbitrary control of the guards. Even going to the toilet became a privilege which a guard could grant or deny at his whim. Indeed, after the nightly 10:00 P.M. lights out “lock-up,” prisoners were often forced to urinate or defecate in a bucket that was left in their cell. On occasion the guards would not allow prisoners to empty these buckets, and soon the prison began to smell of urine and feces – further adding to the degrading quality of the environment.

Six days into the two-week experiment, Zimbardo had to stop it for the psychological toll it was taking on the students. He later served as an expert witness during one of the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture trials. The accepted lesson of the controversial experiment is that, under the right circumstances, “institutional forces and peer pressure” can turn good people evil.

That assumes they were good people to start. A tweet that came across my feed questions that proposition when it comes to the Trump cult:

I have said this before and it bears repeating, President Trump doesn’t cause people to lose their character, he reveals people’s character for who they truly are. And for that we should all be grateful that we can see clearly.— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) November 11, 2019

Now, cult members are tasked with defending their leader’s actions and (soon) their own. Trump places fealty to Himself above the national interest. His defenders so far are condemning the impeachment process. Trump demands they defend his actions vis-à-vis Ukraine explicitly. Will they accede to his demand and sink to defending the indefensible?

“Tribalistic party identity is basically all the president’s defenders have left,” Eugene Robinson writes:

They complained that the House had not taken a formal vote to proceed with impeachment . . . but then the House held such a vote. They complained that the House impeachment investigators were taking depositions of witnesses in secret . . . but Republican committee members already had access to those hearings. They complained that transcripts of those interviews had not been released . . . but now they are being released, and one of the loudest complainers, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) says he will refuse to read them. They complained that there had been no public testimony that would allow the American people to judge for themselves . . . but a public phase of the House investigation is beginning this week, with the first witnesses scheduled to appear Wednesday.

Team MAGA has already sunk to promoting propaganda and disinformation from a Russian-inspired effort designed to exonerate Russia’s role in interfering with the 2016 elections. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Fla.) is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. He has made clear he plans to shrug off Trump’s endangering national security and possible violations of law as justified by Trump’s “documented belief that the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election.”

Michelle Goldberg explains:

The conspiracy theories that undergird the president’s “documented belief” aren’t really coherent, but they don’t have to be to serve their purpose, which is sowing confusion about the well-established fact that Russia assisted Trump’s campaign. They posit not just that [Paul] Manafort was set up, but also that Democrats worked with Ukraine to frame Russia for hacking Democrats’ emails, a dastardly Democratic plot that led to Trump’s election. Naturally, George Soros, perennial scapegoat for the far right, is also involved.

“George Soros was behind it. George Soros’s company was funding it,” Giuliani said on ABC in September, spinning tales of Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Ukraine. Speaking to The Post, Giuliani accused Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, of “working for Soros.” Indeed, Hill in her testimony suggested that a sort of Infowars-era McCarthyism has been loosed on the national security bureaucracy, with “frankly an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about George Soros” used to “target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well.”

Some of these conspiracy theories originated with Manafort colleague Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer, and worked their way into Trump’s already fevered brain.

But the behaviors exhibited by Trump’s defenders from America’s evangelicals to Capitol Hill wags seems to mirror those Jeff Sharlet found among “The Family.” The powerful men among Washington’s most elite, “invisible” prayer circle, Sharlet wrote in 2003, included “Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.). Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.).”

Their mission? To bring Jesus to the world by removing him from “the religious wrapping.” Sharlet wrote about one of their Alexandria, Va. meetings:

“All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked. [Todd Tiahrt, (R-Kansas)]

“A covenant,” Doug [Coe] answered. The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Doug clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Doug said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”

Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.” The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

“That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”

Except now that covenant is Trump plus nothing. Trump’s base as well as his Beltway defenders have been condition — programmed, if you like — by their religious discipline to give themselves over to higher (spiritual) authority. In the inveterate alpha dog, Donald Trump, they’ve found a temporal one. Their predisposition threatens us all.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

Former PBS host Bill Moyers tells CNN he fears for the United States, “for the first time, because a society, a democracy, can die of too many lies. And we’re getting close to that terminal moment, unless we reverse the obsession with lies that are being fed around the country.” Moyers and colleague Michael Winship bought a full page ad in the New York Times urging PBS to rebroadcast the impeachment hearings in prime time. Hearings begin Wednesday. PBS rebuffed their request:

“If you want to get the whole story of Trumpgate, you need to watch the whole hearing,” he said, noting that many Americans will be at work and at school during the testimony, unable to watch in real time.

“This is a moment in American history where the arc of justice will either be bent forward or it will be bent backward,” he said. “So everyone who wants to see it should have the chance to see the whole story.”

Moyers also noted that “you never know what’s going to happen in the hearings.”

Oh, I think we do if the GOP has anything to say about it. Republicans have added Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to the House Intelligence Committee where hearings begin. They plan to tailor their performances to an audience of one. The acting president will be watching (Politico):

“Leader [Kevin] McCarthy, ranking member [Devin] Nunes and Jim Jordan are taking preparation efforts to heightened levels with a work-around-the-clock mentality,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, told POLITICO.

(Fair warning: Put down your coffee now.)

“Depositions are being reviewed to show the inconsistencies from facts that we know exist,” Meadows added.

Facts?!

“Jim Jordan has been on the front lines in the fight for fairness and truth,” McCarthy said in a statement. “His addition will ensure more accountability and transparency in this sham process.”

(Was I right about the coffee?)

The president wants a spectacle. Republicans plan to stage one.

“You want your best contributors for ‘showtime.’ Driving public opinion is key to many — on both sides of the aisle,” one GOP lawmaker said. “Jordan is definitely a showman.”

Welcome back, my friends
To the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside! Come inside

By the rules, Jordan will get one five-minute round of questioning “unless other rank-and-file members yield their time to him.” They will.

The New York Times Editorial Board this morning provides a “field guide” to the GOP line of counterattack on “facts that we know exist,” everything from “quid pro no” to “quid pro so?” to, finally, “This is a coup by the Deep State! A decorated American soldier is a Ukrainian agent! The witnesses who have testified are ‘Never Trumpers‘!”

Buckle up.

Come inside, the show’s about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you’ll get your money’s worth
The greatest show in Heaven, Hell, or Earth

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Catherine Rampell delivers some good news otherwise buried in a torrent of bad for the Trump administration.

First, to summarize the bad.

Witness after witness before House investigators confirm in their testimony that Donald Trump, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giluliani and their associates attempted to use the presidency for personal, political gain. The revelations have turned his spinning defenders into dervishes. It will only get worse for Trump (and harder for his lackeys to spin) when public hearings begin next week.

Politico reports:

In the assessment of the five diplomats at the center of the impeachment inquiry, Giuliani was everywhere. He was texting with State Department officials and directing U.S. foreign policy, all seemingly at the behest of the president. He was Trump’s free-wheeling emissary seeking to push a foreign government to, in effect, publicly tar Joe Biden.

House investigators have stitched together a uniquely Trumpian narrative — one of retribution against perceived enemies, defiance of diplomatic norms and a pervasive fear that Russia would benefit from the disarray, all to help Trump fend off his top 2020 rival.

Donald Trump has turned the executive branch into an ongoing criminal enterprise like his others. House investigations underway will determine whether Congress will shut down this one the way the state of New York shut down the fraudulent Trump Foundation. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Thursday Trump must pay $2 million in damages “for improperly using charitable assets to intervene in the 2016 presidential primaries and further his own political interests.” The money will go to nonprofit organizations in the state.

In “19 paragraphs of factual admissions,” Trump and the Foundation admitted multiple acts of self-dealing in court filings while claiming in public James “is deliberately mischaracterizing this settlement for political purposes.” And why isn’t she investigating the Clinton Foundation, huh?!

Expect past Trumpian behavior to be prologue.

Now, for the good news. Medicaid work requirements designed to kick poor and sick Americans out of Medicaid coverage are beginning to crumble, writes Rampell:

I’m referring to Medicaid work requirements, policies that kick low-income people off their insurance if they don’t register sufficient work hours. Until recently, it looked as if these programs were on an unstoppable march, with two dozen states pursuing them.

But with the state elections in Kentucky and Virginia this week, plus policy rollbacks recently announced in other states, things are starting to change.

Medicaid work requirements might sound reasonable enough. Ostensibly, they’re about helping poor people move up in the world, or at least making sure they’re not taking advantage of taxpayer largesse. If you buy the premise that poor people choose to be poor because poverty is just too darn comfortable, maybe taking away their access to insulin or inhalers is just the kick in the rear they need to go out and get a job.

Turns out that’s not how it works. Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds most recipients are already working. Most of those who aren’t are in school, care-giving or ill. Or else lack the child care, skills, or clean criminal records needed to hold down a job.

But it is no surprise to find that to dislodge a few suspected, undeserving deadbeats, “small-government” conservatives are willing to spend more than $250 million in Kentucky alone. And they don’t mind if this evil rain falls on the just as well as the unjust:

In Arkansas — the first state to actually implement these requirements — more than 18,000 people lost their health insurance over the course of a few months. Many of these Arkansans actually met the work requirements, or were legally exempted from them. Yet they were still purged from the insurance rolls, due to onerous and confusing reporting requirements.

Consider one such person whom I profiled last year, Adrian McGonigal. He was employed at a chicken plant and thought he had sufficiently documented his hours. He lost his Medicaid coverage anyway, leaving him unable to get the prescriptions he needed to manage his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He landed in the hospital multiple times and eventually lost his job.

Rampell cites a New England Journal of Medicine study that found work requirements shrank insurance rolls but did not increase employment. Oh, work requirements may also be illegal, but in this administration, that’s probably by design.

Even so, states are figuring out this “sticks” approach is costing them. They are shelving work requirements:

In fact, just last month, two more states — Arizona and Indiana — announced that they were pausing programs that had already been approved by the Trump administration.

Then on Tuesday, Democratic electoral victories in Kentucky and Virginia raised expectations that these states will soon rescind their states’ policies as well. This would mimic a similar reversal from Maine earlier this year, when a Democrat replaced a far-right Republican as governor.

The progress isn’t universal. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) recently unveiled his own work requirements proposal — expected legal, administrative and human costs be damned.

For now, Georgia appears to be as much an outlier as Kemp. Authoritarians gonna authoritarian.

First, this isn’t a horse race. What we see in 2020 election prognostication is a media as flummoxed as the Democrats about how to deal with a phenomenon like Donald Trump. The Fourth Estate has yet to shake itself out of covering this presidency, this election, as it would a normal one. The election is a horse race. It’s always a horse race. This one, 2020, is a horse race. Except this is not Situation Normal, even if it is AFU.

The Washington Post and ABC News have another poll to show us this morning. This one purports (as they all do) to give us some insight into where the 2020 presidential race is headed one year out:

The new poll highlights the degree to which most of the country already has made a judgment about the president’s performance and their voting preferences next year. Among the 39 percent of registered voters who approve of Trump’s job performance, Trump is winning at least 95 percent support against each of five possible Democratic opponents. But among the 58 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump, he receives no more than 7 percent support.

Etc., etc.

And yet, the House will release another tranche of impeachment inquiry transcripts today. Politico asks, “Since the release of the first two transcripts … Monday, have you seen a single stitch of information that helps President DONALD TRUMP? Have you found any information exculpatory for him? Can you name one single fact that’s changed the basic arc of this story?”

The impeachment inquiry the Ukraine affair spawned is only going to get worse for the White House. Polls purporting to provide insight into next November’s outcome are meaningless except as thermometer readings of how the patient, our very republic, is faring today.

That’s the trouble with normal, Bruce Cockburn sang, “it always gets worse.” And it will. The question is, for whom?

The problem with “normal” press coverage of Donald Trump is it throws gasoline on a flame. Trump’s informal interactions with the press are litanies of unchallenged lies.

“We’ll be showing that to you real soon.” [evidence that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is a Never-Trumper]

“The whistleblower gave a false report.”

“I have the real polls.”

“It was a perfect phone call.”

Why must the Fourth Estate encourage Trump’s performance-lying? Virtually everything he says is a lie. Asking Trump questions they know he will lie about gives those lies oxygen, spreading them like those your right-wing uncle used to forward in chain emails. Broadcasting lies (not uttered under oath) is not news. It is comforting the Afflictor.

The problem, of course, is what to do about it. There is no journalistic or business model for reporting on a chief executive who is either a pathological liar or, worse, a methodically deliberate one.

CNN’s Daniel Dale live-tweets Trump’s MAGA rallies. He tries “to give Trump the maximum benefit of the doubt.” Why? A courtesy to the office, one presumes, not to the man.

Trump has “given us reason to doubt literally everything he’s saying” because he is “proactively lying about tiny stuff all the time.” But @ddale8 says “I still try to give Trump the maximum benefit of the doubt” – watch his full remarks here pic.twitter.com/Fv95tMBfQP— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 4, 2019

Credit Dale’s tweeting with live-correcting Trump on the fly.

But even when the press tries to push back live, as talk-show show hosts did on Sunday, interviews with Trump administration officials are time I’ll never get back. Nothing new is revealed. It’s talking points and propaganda reinforced from coast to coast. The press persists in going through the motions of covering this administration as it would a normal one.

As worrisome are the Democratic presidential candidates running as if there is a normal to get back to. Jamelle Bouie comments this morning on the Democrats who have yet to admit that is not going to happen:

Arguably the most important divide in the Democratic primary field isn’t by ideology, but between those candidates who understand the obstacles ahead and those who don’t. Despite the example of the last 10 years, the centrist candidates are still running as if persuasion and compromise will win the day.

Good luck with that.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Virginia Democrats have a lot to crow about this morning. Elsewhere, some interesting results too. Too many to capture this morning, but let’s have a go with some headlines.

Virginia

Democrats gained full control of the state government for the first time in a generation, flipping at least two seats in the state Senate and at least five in the House of Delegates. They were aided in part by strong turnout and by court-ordered redrawing of state House districts earlier this year. Republicans have not won a statewide race in Virginia since 2009.

An upset in suburban Richmond makes Ghazala Hashmi, a former college literature professor, the first Muslim woman to win a seat in the state Senate:

“I didn’t know if I actually had a home in this country,” she said in an interview before the voting. “My anxiety was caused by wondering if other people would speak up and support the assault we were seeing on civil liberties.” She decided to speak up and represent herself.

Other notable winners on Tuesday included Shelly Simonds, a Democrat who lost a House race in 2017 in a random drawing after the votes produced a dead tie. In a rematch, Ms. Simonds defeated the Republican incumbent, David Yancey.

Last night Simonds won the seat in Newport News by 18 points.

Juli Briskman, the cyclist who two years ago lost her job after flipping off Donald Trump’s motorcade, won a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. She defeated an eight-year Republican incumbent.

Looking forward to representing my friends & neighbors in #Algonkian District who backed me up today! So proud that we were able to #FlipLoudpun #FlipVA #LOCO219 Thank you Loudoun! https://t.co/vRcDUih1AP

— Juli Briskman 🌞 (@julibriskman) November 6, 2019

Kentucky

Democrat Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s sitting attorney general, narrowly defeated unpopular Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by a mere 5,100 votes (0.4%) in a state President Donald Trump carried in 2016 by 30 points:

Bevin, elected governor in 2015, is a deeply unpopular figure in Kentucky. He has faced backlash for seeking to undercut the state’s Medicaid expansion and calling teachers “selfish” and accusing them of a “thug mentality” when they protested after he threatened to cut their pensions.

Still, Democrats’ victory in a state that Trump carried by 30 percentage points in the 2016 election could be seen as an ominous sign for the President heading into his 2020 reelection bid. The result showed that Trump wasn’t able to carry his preferred candidate over the finish line. It was also a potential sign that Democrats’ start of impeachment proceedings against Trump has not yet triggered enough anger within the GOP base, or backlash among independents and moderates, to benefit Republicans.

Or it simply could be Trump, like Bevin (who campaigned on his close connection to Trump), has worn out his welcome even in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state, and the effects of the impeachment have already begun to eat into Trump’s base. Bevin has not conceded. He has several options for contesting Tuesday’s results.

Here’s Trump saying at his rally in Kentucky last night that Matt Bevin losing “sends a really bad message” and pleading with his fans, “you can’t let that happen to me!”

Welp, it happened. pic.twitter.com/LUHSUAgSnB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2019

Mississippi

Republican Tate Reeves handily defeated the state’s attorney general, Democrat Jim Hood, to win the governor’s race in Mississippi. Republicans maintain their control of the governor’s mansion and majorities in both legislative chambers.

Pennsylvania

“The blue wave crashes down on Pennsylvania again,” blares the Philadelphia Inquirer headline:

The political forces that shaped last year’s midterm elections showed no signs of abating Tuesday, as voters turned on Republicans and establishment Democrats alike in races from Philadelphia and Scranton to the suburbs of Delaware and Chester Counties.

Blogger Susie Madrak wanted to make sure the significance of Democrats’ “comfortable leads” in these local elections in the swing state of Pennsylvania don’t get lost in the other election news:

You probably don't understand the significance of Dems taking every single county race in PA's Delaware County, but I do. Home to the most corrupt GOP machine in the U.S., this win tells me Donald Trump and his asskissers have nowhere left to hide.

— Suburban Guerrilla 💙 (@SusieMadrak) November 6, 2019

Delaware County in suburban Philadelphia has been under Republican control since the Civil War:

Democrats declared victory in three races Tuesday night for Delaware County’s five-member council, sweeping Republicans entirely from what had been an all-Republican panel just a couple years ago.

Brian Zidek says that since the Civil War, in order to get anything done in Delco, you had to be a Republican. “Well, that shit stops today.” pic.twitter.com/qddoYFp4bj

— Vinny Vella (@Vellastrations) November 6, 2019

Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks won an at-large seat on Philadelphia City Council in a historic victory, taking a seat held by Republicans for the last 70 years, the Inquirer reports:

“We broke the GOP,” Brooks said at a victory party in North Philadelphia. “We beat the Democratic establishment. … They said a black single mom from North Philly wasn’t the right person but we have shown them that we are bigger than them.”

Democratic turnout in the suburbs in 2018 and 2019 could spell trouble for Trump in 2020:

Democratic pickups in Virginia occurred in Washington, D.C., and Richmond suburbs that already had trended in the party’s direction in recent years. In Kentucky, Beshear gained considerable ground on Bevin in Kentucky’s suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, counties that had helped propel the Republican to office four years ago. Other statewide GOP candidates in Kentucky won by comfortable margins. But the dip at the top of the ticket still offered another example in the Trump era of suburban voters’ willingness to abandon established Republican loyalties – even with the president making a personal appeal on behalf of a GOP standard-bearer.

One can hope.

All four White House officials scheduled to give closed-door testimony today in the House impeachment inquiry will not appear, multiple news outlets report. They include National Security Council lawyers John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis as well Brian McCormack of the office of management and budget, and Robert Blair, a top aide to chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Eisenberg and McCormack are under subpoena. Blair was on the July 25 call with the president of Ukraine at the center of the inquiry.

CNN reports the administration is claiming executive privilege in Eisenberg’s case, while officials claim Ellis, McCormack and Blair won’t be able to have a White House lawyer present.

OMB officials Michael Duffey and Russell Vought will not appear as scheduled later this week, a source tells CNN.

The Washington Post explains:

Russell Vought, a Mulvaney protege who leads the White House Office of Management and Budget, intends a concerted defiance of congressional subpoenas in coming days, and two of his subordinates will follow suit — simultaneously proving their loyalty to the president and creating a potentially critical firewall regarding the alleged use of foreign aid to elicit political favors from a U.S. ally.

The OMB is at the nexus of the impeachment inquiry because Democrats are pressing for details about why the White House budget office effectively froze the Ukraine funds that Congress had already appropriated.

Donald Trump is his own war room, press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News. He is enraged that his “employees” have been testifying before Congress. He threatens to expose the whistleblower whose original complaint is irrelevant now that his account has been corroborated by multiple administration officials. Trump threatened Sunday to expose Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (who already testified) as a “Never Trumper.” Reporters would see his evidence against an active duty Army officer on his White House staff “very soon.”

Trump-watchers know by now not to hold their breaths waiting.

Current and former officials tell the Post Trump “has asked for copies of witness statements so he can decide how to criticize them, complained that his lawyers are not doing enough to stop people from talking, and even encouraged members of Congress to question the credibility of people working in his own administration.”

Schooled in the dark art of winning at all costs by “master of situational immorality” Roy Cohn, Trump appears rattled. “Never admit mistakes. Always attack your accuser. Win no matter what. Gloat when you do,” the New York Daily News described Cohn’s strategy. Trump is clinging to Cohn’s advice while stonewalling the impeachment inquiry with a “prevent defense.”

False stories are being reported that a few Republican Senators are saying that President Trump may have done a quid pro quo, but it doesn’t matter, there is nothing wrong with that, it is not an impeachable event. Perhaps so, but read the transcript, there is no quid pro quo!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2019

Trump has gone from claiming there was no quid pro quo for releasing military aid to Ukraine to suggesting if there was, there was nothing impeachable about it. Cohn would not approve.

His defenders appeared on the Sunday talk shows claiming Trump committed no extortion because, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway told “Fox News Sunday,” “[Ukraine] got their aid, and that’s what’s important.” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told “Meet the Press,” “We know there’s no Ukraine investigation … the military aid got there.” Ukraine never delivered, so how could there be a crime?

But conspiracy is itself a crime. How many people has the U.S. jailed for terrorist plots they planned but never carried out?

The acting president found himself booed at two sporting events within a week. Trump’s ego is very fragile. He’s so accustomed to basking in glory at his MAGA rallies that he’ll internalize these booing incidents. A few more could shake his confidence both in his re-electability and his ability to hold off impeachment in the House that now seems inevitable. He’s already worried his firewall in the Senate may not hold.

Trump’s strategy to resist impeachment investigation is to commit more impeachable offences in public, which congress will have to investigate, leading him to commit more impeachable offences in public, etc. etc. In theory this could stretch things out forever. https://t.co/vNNC1b6cyh— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 4, 2019

“Strategy” may be generous here. Trump is clearly on the defensive and unaccustomed to playing defense.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.